On July 11, Iomega Corporation announced that it had reached a definitive agreement to acquire CSCI, Inc., a San Diego-based managed services and outsourced IT company. In the company’s announcement, CEO Jonathon Huberman said, “Iomega is taking the first step toward becoming a managed services company.”

While Iomega isn’t the first company to make the move from a product-centric to a managed services oriented organization, it is the most recent to jump on the managed services bandwagon via an acquisition strategy aimed at accelerating the transition process.

Over the past few years, a number of prominent hardware and software companies–including Sun Microsystems, Symantec and Cisco Systems–have acquired and integrated managed service providers (MSPs) into their operations with varying degrees of success.

Like Iomega, these companies have recognized that customers of all sizes have become fed up with the hassles and inefficiences of implementing and administering their own IT operations. They also see the opportunity to create a stronger connection with their customers and gain an ongoing revenue stream via managed services at a time when customer loyalty is harder to maintain, especially in commodity hardware markets like Iomega’s traditional storage business.

Although CSCI isn’t a prominent player in the managed services industry, the regional provider is the 2006 winner of Juniper Networks’ “Managed Services Provider of the Year” award and its OfficeScreen® suite of managed virtual private networks (VPNs) provides small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with secure wide-area networks to cost-effectively link their offices and remote workers.

In fact, CSCI has gone through its own transition from a system integration orientation to a managed services business model. This has forced it to not only build a unique VPN solution, but transform its corporate culture from a project-oriented environment to an ongoing and proactive management orientation.

Having built a solid managed VPN service, CSCI has also succeeded in winning channel partnerships with a variety of value-added resellers, hosting companies and carriers including Mpower, New Edge Networks, Qwest Communications and SBC, now AT&T.

THINKstrategies believes Iomega’s acquisition of CSCI is a smart move.

Not only is customer interest in managed services on the rise, but managed security and storage services are typically among the first forms of managed service that SMBs adopt. By coincidence, the Iomega acquisition of CSCI came at about the same time that EMC was announcing its acquisition of RSA Security to further demonstrate the convergence of the security and storage management worlds.

By buying rather than building its own managed services, Iomega can quickly expand the existing OfficeScreen business in the U.S. and expand into international markets. However, anyone who has gone through an acquisition process–as I have more than once–knows that it can be a painful and often unsuccessful process. No matter how compatible the companies’ products and services may be, organizational and political processes can get in the way of success.

The challenge for Iomega will be effectively leveraging rather than unintentionally leveling its new asset, and using it as a vehicle for transforming its corporate culture from a product-centric to a services-driven orientation.